‘The Last Sunrise’ Prime Video Review: Every YA Cliché Under the Sun

The young adult novel—and its inevitable movie adaptation—has become such a codified format that after watching barely two minutes of one of these films (I assume the same applies to reading the books), you can already predict almost everything that’s going to happen. I’m sure there’s a market for this kind of literature and these movies, but it’s one I find completely alien. I’d like to think teenagers are a little smarter and demand more from their streaming entertainment than something as basic as The Last Sunrise, a film that’s little more than a collection of pretty landscapes and attractive (but troubled) people having a good time (while also having a terrible one) on an idyllic beach.

The movie’s main local selling point is easy enough to understand for fans of Maia Reficco, who carries Carlson Young’s adaptation of Anna Todd’s novel. Todd is a bestselling author in the genre known as YA (Young Adult). Reficco plays Oriah «Ry» Pera, a twenty-something from Texas who suffers from tuberous sclerosis, a rare genetic disorder that causes severe epileptic seizures and is all but incurable. She takes powerful medication to keep the seizures at bay, but it leaves her weak and groggy. Surgery is an option, but she refuses to undergo it because of the risks involved.

The film takes place in Mallorca, where Ry travels with her mother, Isolde (Eva Longoria), who was born there and is buying land to build a resort. Ry quickly befriends a few girls at the hotel, and at a nudist beach she meets Julián García (Fernando Lindez), an impossibly handsome local who initially looks down on her as a guiri—Spanish slang for a foreign tourist—but gradually warms to her. Naturally, he has no idea she’s living with a serious medical condition. And she, of course, has no clue why he constantly looks like the weight of the world is on his shoulders—or why he’s perpetually surrounded by people who seem to have wandered in from a villain casting call.

And so, amid gorgeous scenery, romantic songs, and plot contrivances that make the world feel about the size of half a handkerchief, unfolds this tale of love, illness, toned bodies, sunsets and sunrises, and every other staple you’d expect from one of these teenage romance paperbacks. Not a single convention of the subgenre goes unobserved. People cry and suffer, yet somehow never end up with messy hair or smudged makeup. Everyone wears designer labels, even to the hospital. And any issue that strays from the central romantic melodrama—there’s a token nod here to the harmful effects of tourism on places like Mallorca—is wrapped up with almost comical ease.

Reficco is a talented actress, although here she’s been cast as a character who doesn’t speak Spanish—which means she has to deliberately speak it badly—a choice that also undercuts whatever chemistry she’s meant to have with Lindez. His surname more or less tells you what his job is in the movie: to be the devastatingly handsome boy with an «old soul,» forever suffering and loving at the same time. Add a dash of family drama, a few perfunctory comic beats, a minor side plot, and a historical soap opera that suddenly barges into the narrative, and you’ve got everything The Last Sunrise has to offer. It’s the kind of movie that could easily have been written by an AI trained on a couple dozen young adult novels.

Come to think of it, it probably could have directed it, too.